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Louis Aragon was born on October 3, 1897, in Paris, France. He graduated from Lycée Carnot and then studied medicine at the Sorbonne, where he befriended fellow medical student André Breton. In 1917, he was drafted into World War I and served in a military hospital. There, he met Guillaume Apollinaire, and they became close friends. Alongside Breton, Paul Éluard, and Philippe Soupault, Aragon helped further develop the ideas of Surrealism initially formulated by Apollinaire. His shift from Dadaism to Surrealism culminated with the publication of the 'Manifeste du Surréalisme' in 1924. Around the same time, he released 'Le Libertinage,' a collection of short stories and episodes arranged as a Surrealist collage.
In 1927, following a two-year affair with the flamboyant publisher Nancy Cunard, heiress to the Cunard shipping fortune, Aragon wrote what Albert Camus later called "the best and most beautiful of erotic texts," though he refused to publish it under his own name. At the height of his radical opposition to traditional norms, Aragon joined the French Communist Party. He also met Elsa Triolet, sister of Russian actress Lilya Brik. In 1930, they traveled to the Soviet Union at the invitation of Maxim Gorky and participated in the first conference of Soviet writers. Influenced by his wife and Vladimir Mayakovsky, Aragon published "The Red Front," which called for revolution in France and led to a five-year suspended sentence. Around this time, Aragon and André Malraux founded the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture. He condemned bourgeois culture and was a vocal critic of André Gide. During World War II, Aragon wrote anti-fascist poetry under various pseudonyms for Les Editions de Minuit and Lettres Françaises, actively participating in the French Resistance.
In 1955, Aragon published an essay on Soviet literature focusing on non-Russian writers from the USSR's ethnic republics. In 1962, he and André Maurois co-authored a "Parallel History" of the Soviet Union and the United States. His previously mild stance toward Socialist realism grew more critical after Nikita Khrushchev was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev. In 1971, he published an extensive biography of Henri Matisse. Following the death of his wife, Aragon publicly acknowledged his bisexuality and participated in gay pride events. He passed away on December 24, 1982, in Paris, France.
